FRANK LENTI

BUILDING THE GOAL-LINE OFFENSE

MOUNT CARMEL HIGH SCHOOL, IL.

I am going to talk to you this afternoon on what it takes to build a goal-line offense. At the end of the lecture, I will show you what we have done over the years as far as sequence football on our goal-line offense. I have a list of resources that I believe provides good football information. First is a book by Larry Beckish. The title of the book is I Believe. He is a retired coach now, but it is one of the best little football books I have ever had. When I first saw it, I bought a copy for everyone on my coaching staff. Larry coached at a lot of great places, and he is as sharp as they come in football. There is the American Football Quarterly Coaching Series of Championship Performance in Sports Psychology which is excellent. Also, you have some of the Coach of the Year Clinic Manuals here on sale, and they are excellent. If anything I talk about today interests you, the material is in the 1999 Coach of the Year Clinics Manual they have in the exhibit area for sale. Before I can talk about goal-line offense, I must talk about what my philosophy. I will not give you many X's and O's in this session. What I want to do is to get you to think of what you need to do to make your goal-line offense successful. Plus, I will show you some things I feel are important in goal-line offense. First of all, the offense must be based on execution. You must do things the offense can be successful at, as opposed to doing things they cannot do. For example, we are a split-backs veeroffensive team. People ask me if we change our offense when we have to pass the ball. No, we do not change our offense when we have to pass the

ball. We segment our offense. We take the parts of our offense that our quarterback can do well, and we emphasize those things. When we have a quarterback that can throw the ball, we throw the ball more. We ask the kids to do what they are physically and mentally capable of doing on offense. We make sure they do it. If they will not do it, we get someone else. We do not settle for anything less. A phrase we use all of the time is this: "A player that will not do what we want is not any better than a player that can't do what we want." At least the player that cant do what we want will die trying. There are five things you need done with the players. First, you must coach them and develop them. Second, you win by doing the little things. Coach them in the huddle, coach each individual step, coach alignment, and coach all the little things. The team that wins is the team that does all the little things right. We insist that our players do the little things and that they do them well. Next, is the fundamental aspect of the game. Teaching must be done in the classroom and not on the field. I do not know how your practice is set up, but we meet with our kids and make sure they know what we are doing. When we go outside, we want a lot of repetitions. We want to be organized when we go on the field. We want to go from whistle to whistle. We want a lot of reps on the field. We hustle from play to play. We call it coaching on the run. Our coaches jog from area to area between drills. You must set the tempo for the kids. Mental errors will not be tolerated. The players must know what to do and how to do it. This goes back to the players doing what they are expected

to do. If the player will not take time to learn his assignments, he will get you beat. You must make sure you play kids that give you a chance to be successful because they know what to do and how to do it. Offense is a team game. The team is more important than the individual. We call it a "we" thing and not a "me" thing. If you can get your kids to buy into that philosophy, you are halfway home. Our team was the "Team of the Decade" in the 1990's in Illinois. Our record was 122 wins and 12 losses. That is not bad when you consider that we play a nine game regular season schedule before the playoffs. Do you know how many Division I running backs we had in that time period? We only had one Division I Running back. We had two Division I quarterbacks. We have had some great players including Donovan McNabb. However, he was one of the few quarterbacks we had that did not start in a State Championship game. The point is this. Do not assume you are going to win just because you have some great athletes. We are not interested in building stars in our program. We are not going to build statistics for one or two players. Consistency is a must in order to be successful. If you change your offense from year to year, it is hard to get consistency. I do not know how your kids or your coaches understand what you are doing if you change from year to year. Football should be fun. Fun comes from doing things well and enjoying success. We tell our players fun is doing something well. It is fun to get an A out of the classroom. We tell them they can have fun at practice even though we are going to bust their tails working out. They are working toward getting better. They must get better physically, mentally, and emotionally. We do not want them to think practice is a waste of time. We want them to think of practice as a way for them to get better and to give them a better chance to be successful. Here is something we do early in the season or in early August. We call it a "do over day." We let all of our coaches know when we feel it is a good

time to have the "do over day." Nothing the players do in practice is going to be good enough and so we have them do it over. It is good to set the tempo emotionally and mentally with our kids. We tell the kids we are not going to be satisfied unless they do things as near perfect as they can. We just call it a "do over day." It lets the kids know we are not going to accept anything but their best effort. We believe confidence will build consistency. Doing the same things over and over, and doing them right, builds confidence. I am not interested in entertaining the kids at practice. Some of the drills we do in August are the same drills we are doing in the State Championship Game in November. We call it being raised on the basics. "Be Brilliant on the Basics." We feel we must be great on the fundamentals. The goal line must take priority in your offense. There is no reason to get down there if you can't score. We must study ourselves and go over our goal-line tactics. Do your self-study of your offense. Do you know what your opponents know about what you are doing on the goal-line offense? You must do the same thing on defense and in your kicking game. We want everyone doing the best they are capable of doing and nothing less. We do not walk on the field, and this includes the coaches. We want our coaches to coach on the run, and they are coaching on the go. Let me get into the goal-line theory and philosophy. First, you attack defenses in one of two ways. You attack in an area where the defense is somewhat weaker, or you attack an individual whose style of play can be exploited. If we are going to attack an individual, we go for a lineman first. If we get in a game and find a player that we feel is poorly coached or is a weak player, we will attack that person. In practice, we attack the alignment first. Also, when we get into the game, we attack the alignment first. We are going to present a well-balanced offense inside the 10-yard line. The question is made as to

what is balanced offense. I know what balanced is to us. Some coaches think it is 50 - 50. It is 50 percent run and 50 percent pass. Other coaches may say they want 40 runs and 30 passes out of 70 plays. They want to spread the ball around. For us we want to force the defense to balance up to our offensive formations. We want to be able to go from three wide receivers to two tight ends with the same personnel. Today, the power teams are big personnel teams. We will take our split end and teach him a couple of plays so he can run a few plays from the backside. We do this to keep teams from trying to figure out what we are doing with the offense. We are going to run option football inside the 10yard line. We still want to attack across all fronts. We still want to spread the defense on the goal line if we can. We must maintain good line splits. You must talk to your kids about their line splits. Where do you stand in relation to the team during practice? I stand behind the offensive line. The first thing I do when the kids go up to the ball is to check their splits. What happens is the offensive line tends to tighten down when we are on the goal line. If they do that, it tightens down the defense as well. We try to show them what happens with bodies on the goal line. If we tighten down, it just makes the job easier for the defense. You must convince your kids that the gap defense gives the offense good angles. What we do is to have a "check-with-me" practice. Based on what the defense does when they line up, you can attack them inside or outside. We must eliminate mistakes. Penalties and missed assignments will stop you before the other team does. We need to look at these things as we go through the season. Control the line of scrimmage. If the defensive line penetrates, we should use it to our advantage. If you are a penetrating team, you do that to stop the option, so we are going to run the lead draw and we are going to trap you. What answers do you have for those questions in your offense? If the defense is going to run up the field on you, what are you going to do? Teams know against us the first play they have to stop is the outside veer and the counter option. Based on what we want to

do, we usually have a good idea of where we want to attack teams. We want our linemen to sustain their blocks and to keep their shoulders low. We want them to get their shoulders in the end zone. We want them to get movement at the point of attack. I coach our offensive line. We tell them from the get-go that anytime they get inside the 5-yard line, when we snap the ball, they are to finish the play with their shoulders in the end zone. Psychologically what are they thinking? "We have to get the defender off the line of scrimmage by getting up underneath him. We are only going to be successful if we can finish the play with the shoulders in the end zone." If we can get the offensive linemen to end up with their pads in the end zone, where is the running back going to end up? There is a good chance he will end up in the end zone. These are little things that we want our kids to know right from the start of the season. We will use all four running backs in our goal-line offense. We want to use the plays we run on the goal line to either side of the line. We use speed, deception, finesse, and power in our attack. We have a little of each of those ingredients in our goal-line offense. Look at your goal-line offense. Are you a power team, a finesse team, or are you a speed team, or do you rely on deception on the goal line? Our power plays are our 36 and 37 plays. Those are the outside-veer plays for us. We are going to double team at the point of attack and read the defense from there. The finesse or deception plays could be our draw play or the trap plays. It could be a flat-out option play to get the ball outside to the perimeter. Here are a couple of other coaching points on getting the shoulder pads low and into the end zone. Most of the time we teach our kids to carry the ball in their arms with three points of pressure. When we get inside the 10-yard line, we change the points of pressure on the ball. We want them to carry the ball in front of them with their head up and their shoulder pads down. They can use one hand or two on the ball, but we want the ball in front of them. We want their pads down and the eyes up. We do this so the defense does not have

as good of an opportunity to get to the football. The second point is this. We teach the kids to run through the back of the end zone. They are not running to the end zone. They are running through the end zone. We want the running back to keep his eyes up and run with the pads down. His goal is the back of the end zone. We have kids score touchdowns from 30 to 40 yards out. They still do not stop until they get the ball to the back of the end zone. That is how we coach them, and that is what they do. We throw play-action passes off our most effective run plays. We use crossing routes against man coverage. We use the dump pass as well. We want to keep the pressure on the defense. Intensity is a must on the goal line. How do you set the tempo on the goal line? I will cover that later. We use sequence football when possible. We only need three or four running plays and two or three pass plays. We can practice our whole offense on the goal line. We do not need all of our offense on the goal line, but we would rather have too much than not enough offense. We have two big E's down on the goal line. We talk about them all of the time on offense. To us the two big E's stand for Effort and Execution. Effort and execution are going to equal success. If you have great effort and great execution, and you play your fanny off, and execute your assignment to the best of your ability with second and third effort, you have a great chance of being successful. We feel the goal-line package is a limited version of our base offensive package. Again, we are back to that word consistency again. We try to teach our kids that consistency is more important than greatness. If a player only makes one great play in a game, that is no good. We cannot count on a player that only has one great play per game. We would rather have several good plays in the course of the game. I think this is important to coach this into your kids. You want consistency from them in everything they do.

Look at the reasons why you failed to score. Fumbles! Was it a contact fumble or an exchange fumble? If it was because of contact, you will need to emphasize proper handling of the ball. You have to emphasize this to the ball carrier and motivate him to hold on to the football. If it was on the exchange, we want to know if it was caused by penetration, poor technique, or was there a missed assignment. Do you know why the fumble occurred? Those are questions you must answer. Don't junk a play just because it is not working. Find out why the play is not working? Know why you are changing the play. Don't just change the play to be changing it. Another reason why we fail to score on the goal line is because of interceptions. Ask the quarterback "Why did you throw the ball? What did you see?" He may have seen something that you did not see. You may need to go back and look at the tape. When we throw an interception, we want to know if it was because of play selection. Was it a physical or mental thing that happened out on the field? Was it because of poor mechanics on the part of the QB? Was it because of fundamentals of throwing, catching, or pass protection? You need to ask those questions. Penalties will stop you from scoring on the goal line. Concentration mistakes can't be tolerated. Your starting count must not be too complicated. If we run anything on the goal line that is a checkwith-me call, the snap count is always on one. You cannot have too much in the cadence. If I give one of our kids a play, he knows what the snap count is for that play. Now it may change from year to year. For example, on our 20 series, all the snap counts are on quick. On the 30 series, everything is called on the number. For the 40 and 50 series, everything is on one. Whatever we use, we practice it that week. Here is my point: Don't have your starting count for your cadence too complicated. When we get on the goal line, everything is going to be on a quick count which is the first sound. We want to get off the ball and get after your butt, and we do not want the offside penalties.

You should evaluate your first-down calls. Make sure you self-scout yourself on this. Know what you like to do on offense on first down. We like to use different formations. We run a check 36 or a check 39 play. We may run an outside veer to one side of the line. If the defense over shifts to that called side, we check off to the counter option the other way. Review your play selection philosophy. Do not just grab plays that you like. Decide if you are going to attack alignment or personnel. You need to use the press box for help. Does the coach in the press box know what we are looking for? Are we getting the expected look? Are we seeing the defense we worked against in practice? We have gotten very good in our goal-line offense over the last several years. Teams now are playing us with their regular defense inside the 10-yard line. They are using their base defense to try to stop the things that we do best on the goal line. You need to be aware of the clock when you are on the goal line. Do you have a no-huddle, stopthe-clock play? Do you have a two-play sequence you can run from the line of scrimmage? It could be run, run; run, pass, pass; or run, pass. We give our two-play sequence a name. We call it caravan. You can call it whatever you want. You must prepare for a situation when you do not have time to call two plays. Let me talk about some advantages of our goalline offense. Again, see if these advantages apply to your situation. You should write down what you think the advantages are for your goal-line offense. Here are the advantages of the split backs on the goal line. First is continuity. You stay with the same offense that got you down there. Next is simplicity. It reduces teaching time and techniques. Once we teach our offense in August, there is very little we have to do after that. We do have to polish it up from time to time. The key is that we want our kids to be great technicians. Some of the drills we teach in August we are still doing the last week of the season as far as fundamentals are concerned. Be brilliant on the

basics! Don't shortchange your kids there. The third advantage of our offense is that it builds confidence. It can be done and you can prove it with statistics. Develop your own statistics. By doing it this way, the stats mean more to your team and can be helpful. Next I want to talk about some prerequisites for any goal-line offense. First, you can't stop yourself. What are you going to emphasize. Emphasize what is important. Missed assignments are points we emphasize. We do not want any turnovers. Hang on to the football. Look to see if you are doing the things that will allow you to be successful on the goal line We want to identify our bread-and-butter back and get him the football when the game is on the line. Does that mean he gets the ball on every down? No, it does not. You can set things up by formation, and if the defense sets up to stop him, we can use the check-with-me plays. When it is crunch time, we want to figure out a way to get our best back the ball on the goal line. Do you know how to get him the ball? Evaluate your statistics. Do you always run the ball on first down? The opponents have that figured out if you do. Give yourself an opportunity to be successful. Come up with the play-action pass on first down to throw them off balance. We keep a Goal Line Efficiency Chart. We look at the situations and chart the number of time we are successful and the number of times we fail. If we scored a TD, we want to know why we were successful. If we had to settle for a field goal, we want to know why we did not score the TD. Did we do a poor job, did we make the right call, or did we get a penalty? We want to know why we were successful or why we failed. The first why the coaches are going to ask is directed at us. We are not going to blame the kids. We look at the coaching staff. What could we have done better? It is a cardinal rule for us. "What could we as a coaching staff have done better to have given those kids a chance to be more successful?" We tell the kids this. It goes

back to the "me - we" thing. It is not just about them. We are all in this together. The number one play on our goal-line offense is our outside veer. It is the best goal-line and shortyardage play that we have. I will put the play on the overhead, and then I will show you a tape on the play as well. Very quickly I want to show you how we handle the mesh point when we run the outside veer. (Demonstration) If you are an option team, it is something you can use. We want the back running the veer to turn his outside hand and place the thumb on the breastbone pointing down. We want the top of the hand turned up from the breastbone, but the thumb is still on the chest turned down. We want the quarterback to put a soft squeeze on the ball. If the quarterback wants to give the running back the ball he pulls the back hand out from the mesh and presses the ball into the backs bread basket and lets him go with it. If the quarterback does not want the back to get the ball, he takes his elbow and pushes him off the ball. He can feel the elbow and he knows he is not getting the ball, but he continues on his path. When the quarterback is done on the mesh, he wants to get the ball up under his chin if he pulls the ball. He is reading the end on the line of scrimmage while he is executing the mesh. That is his read. The next part of the play is the reaction. We only have one read and one reaction. The quarterback comes down the line and is ready to pitch the ball to the trailing back. He pitches off the scraping linebacker or whoever shows at the line of scrimmage. Years ago we used to teach the pitch with the thumbs down and flip the wrist. If the quarterback got hit by the linebacker or first defender, the ball went on the ground. Now we use the soft basketball technique on the pitch. We grip the ball from the middle to the bottom of the tip of the ball. We pitch the ball as if we were shooting a basketball with the near hand. When he makes the pitch, the off-hand comes in front of him to protect the ball. We want to teach the one-way-go. We want one read and one reaction. On the

outside-veer play, we think give first. If we are going to run the inside-veer play, we think pitch first. If the defensive end does anything to slow the mesh down, the quarterback gives the ball to the running back on the veer. The quarterback is looking at the eyes of the defensive end. If the end is coming down toward the running back hard, the quarterback tucks the ball and gets up the field. If the end is coming at the back but is looking at the quarterback, we want to give the running back the ball. If the quarterback makes a mistake on the play, do not chew him out. You have to work on that play. The question on the veer is this: Can we run the play better than you can defend it, or can you defend the veer better than we can run it? We have one read and one reaction. If you are going to run option football and you tell the quarterback that he has two reads, you are whistling in the wind. That is too much to ask of a kid. We ask him to make one read and one reaction. Again, it is our power off-tackle play. Let me talk about practice time. Our weekly goalline package is a limited version of our base offense. This allows us to minimize our goal-line practice and concentrate on potential problem situations and perfect our execution. Here is exactly what we do during the week. We play most of our home games Saturday night. We do play a few games on Friday night. When I was a student at Mt. Carmel, our league played all of our games on Sunday afternoon. The Chicago Catholic High Schools started playing football in the 1920's and 1930's. There were no NFL games on TV to compete with. There was a college game on Saturday to contend with. High school football was big in Chicago and the games were played on Sundays Here is a good football trivia question. The largest crowd in the history of American football was in the 1930's when over 130,000 people saw a game at old Soldiers Field between a Chicago Public School and a Chicago Catholic School for the City Championship.

Here is our practice schedule for the week. Monday is a light day for us. We go out in helmets and shorts. Tuesday is our first weekday in pads. We work ten minutes on goal-line offense against any unusual defensive fronts you may show us in our next game, or what we think you may show us based on your package. On Wednesday, we go live on the goal line. We get after it. It is our ones vs. defensive ones. Our defense will simulate the opponent's goal-line defense. We use minimal contact once we get into the season. We try to stay off the ground as much as possible. We get after it for ten minutes. We have fun with it. We feel there is less chance in getting someone hurt on the goal line. You can go full speed on the goal line because you do not have someone coming from 15 yards away trying to knock the teeth out of the backs or receivers. Our additional point about our goal-line practice is this. We do not allow the team to tackle below the waist. When we teach tackling in the preseason, we have that same rule. You can never tackle anyone on your own team below the waist. That does two things for us. First, it saves on ankle and knee injuries. Secondly, it makes our defensive players better tacklers. They have to run to be in position to make tackles. We never allow anyone to tackle below the waist in practice. When we get into the game, I do not care how they make the tackles as long as they get them down. You may want to think about this. On Thursday, our goal-line offense works against any defensive stunts and combinations of fronts we may see. We go over all the possible blitz situations. If we play on Saturday, we will go out in light gear on Friday. We have our helmets on and thigh boards in our pants. Our team period is about 30 minutes for that day. We do a little of everything. We may be on the goal line 10 minutes or 15 minutes, depending on what we feel we need to work on. I want to talk about our 36 and 37 outside-veer plays. We teach the quarterback to cut up underneath the linebacker if he scrapes outside.

36 OUTSIDE VEER - 4 CALL

36 OUTSIDE VEER - 5 CALL

36 OUTSIDE VEER - 40 CALL

Those were finesse plays. If we want to run a power play, we can run the same play with zing motion. We want to make sure we secure the linebacker or the man in the B-Gap. We are still going to read the same man, but this gives us power at the point of attack.

36 OUTSIDE VEER - ZING MOTION

Thank you for your attention.

If we want to hand the ball to the lead back, it becomes an I-formation isolation play. Now, the blocking back is up at the line of scrimmage and the tailback is only 4 yards deep. We can put the Z back in motion, so we can pick up the linebacker in the C- or B-Gap. If we want to give the ball to the wing back, we call it 08. It is our reverse play. 08 - FAKE DIVE - ZING MOTION

If the defense sees the wide out coming in motion, they think it is the lead play again. This time we fake the dive and give the ball to the wing back. These are old Wing-T sweep principles. We are only pulling one guard instead of two because the front side guard has to block down or he is covered on the goal line. We want to go inside or outside. We are going to go where the defense is not. We tell our down defender to read the defense and replace him. Don't run away from him, replace him. I will be around until after my second lecture tomorrow. I will be glad to spend time with you on the goal line material if you are interested.